The sane man, known as Pepper, was meant to be held for 72
hours of observation after he beat up three undercover
policemen. Bad judgment and malign bureaucracy turn three days
into months of heavily drugged incarceration.

“Pepper immediately flashed back to the only thing he knew
about mental institutions: the film version of ‘One Flew Over
the Cuckoo’s Nest.”’ It’s been 50 years since Ken Kesey’s novel
came out and it remains inimitable.

LaValle isn’t trying to match the classic, though like
Kesey’s McMurphy, Pepper finds an abusive staff, a slippery
definition of sanity and an unavoidable connection to his fellow
inmates. LaValle throws in a devil as well.

Interesting monsters inhabited LaValle’s previous novel,
“Big Machine.” They were almost-friendly beasties with a key
role in a serpentine plot involving a cultish group under threat
from a breakaway member.

Mythic Fiend

The creature who invades Pepper’s room begins as mythic
fiend and eventually emerges as a longtime patient of hideous
aspect and murderous bent.

He’s mostly offstage, yet present through allusions -- to
Frankenstein, “Jaws,” Poe’s raven, Scrooge’s undigested beef,
and a doctor’s patronizing reference to inner demons. His few
actual appearances are good for a jolt of the macabre.

The novel could have used a lot more jolting. LaValle’s
story plods along like an overmedicated patient, with spurts of
action that generally lead to nothing. Escape is the inevitable
theme, played through several variations.

There are few surprises in LaValle’s jabs at the hospital’s
staff and red tape, the profiling of blacks, the computer scam
that allows billing for services provided to dead people --
complete with an allusion to Gogol’s “Dead Souls.”

Worse, there are lamentably few delights in his prose. The
writing is often flat, rough and unworked. On one page, the word
“Then” begins three sentences in five lines. A chummy voice
occasionally, pointlessly intrudes on the third-person
narration: “Let’s take a moment to be impressed.”

I’m all the more disappointed because LaValle showed a
surfeit of talent in “Big Machine,” which won an American Book
Award in 2010 and promised greater things still. I hope they lie
ahead.

“The Devil in Silver” is published by Spiegel & Grau (412
pages, $27). To order this book in North America, click here.

(Jeffrey Burke is an editor with Muse, the arts and leisure
section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)